I have moved this here to keep it in the history of this main "look up word at cursor" tip (and 833 will redirect to here because this tip will have the most applicable content).

However, I will delete this section because the tip is a rip-off copied from someone's blog, and because when you follow the link in the blog to find the "google" Python module, you learn that it uses the old Google API that no longer functions (i.e. this code will not work).

I started hacking vim + google APIs yesterday to do phrase lookups on Google. Google is much better (but slower than a dictionary) as a contextual speller/data verifier.

This way, if you have a browser open, you get it in a new tab, otherwise you just get the url. I use this little script all the time. Of course, you can leave out the script and just call it directly, etc.

If you use console vim, I'm sure that you could bind it to a key command with map instead of "amenu [menuitem]". But I've never tried.